What the Point of Being in Business? | #210

A successful business is supposed to go somewhere.

Start. Grow. Employ people. Increase turnover. Expand. Scale. And perhaps eventually sell.

But why does a business automatically have to become something bigger than the thing it already is?

In this episode of Messy Business, I’m asking a more fundamental question: what’s the point of being in business in the first place?

I look at the different jobs we expect businesses to do, from generating profit and serving customers to creating jobs, providing freedom, doing something useful, changing the world, and giving their owners a decent life.

Growth absolutely has its place. It can create security, resilience, opportunity, investment, and impact. But we rarely spend as much time defining what enough looks like.

I talk about my own experience of building a bigger, more complicated business and eventually discovering that I didn't particularly like the business I'd created. These days, my business is much simpler: I do useful work I'm good at, get paid for it, and have a life outside it. And I've stopped seeing that as a lack of ambition.  Pasted markdown

Because before deciding how much your business should grow, how productive you should be, how you should market it, or where you want it to be in five years, perhaps there's a question more worth answering: what do you actually want your business to make possible for you?

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